Ok, I’m sold on Blu-Ray

While the format wars on Blu-Ray and HD-DVD were going on, I advised readers of this column to wait until an HD format had emerged as a clear winner. Now that Blu-Ray has won the battle, I have acquired a player and am ready to start offering Blu-Ray reviews for my column.

I picked up Sony’s Playstation 3 as my Blu-Ray player of choice. I chose it not for the game-playing capacity (I don’t care much for video games because I don’t know how to play them well); but rather for its ability to upgrade and similar cost to set-top boxes that didn’t offer that ability.

The current incarnation of the PS3 is $399. It includes a 40GB hard drive, but the instructions that come with it tell you how to swap it for a bigger one. You can purchase a compatible PC laptop drive and swap it out, if you are so inclined. I liked the ability to upload MP3s and photos to it, but that’s also a secondary consideration. As for its Web capabilities, I can do much better on my home computer.

In addition to the Blu-Ray capacity, the PS3 also plays conventional DVDs using “upconvert” technology. This means that it improves the quality of the picture from your conventional DVD. It’s not Blu-Ray, but it’s pretty good.

Warner Bros. was kind enough to send me a copy of their Blu-Ray release of “Twister,” the 1996 film starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as “tornado chasers” in search of a way to track and understand these monster storms. I pulled out my old DVD copy and searched for a suitable scene to do some comparison.

I found several scenes that sold me, but the one that made the most impression was just a simple detail. There is a scene where Hunt and Paxton are in his pickup truck, with the tornado package “Dorothy” visible behind them in the bed of the truck. On the package is a large circle-shaped logo that is unintelligible on the conventional DVD version. It’s not a detail you would notice while enthralled in the film, but it was sufficient to demonstrate the quality of the Blu-Ray format.

I first put the old version in my conventional player. Since that player hooks up to my HDTV using the composite cables, the upconvert function does not apply. The picture looked acceptable, but I did notice that it seemed grainy. The logo was visible, but the words on it were unintelligible.

I then inserted the old version into the PS3 and went to the same scene. The upconvert process cleaned up a lot of the graininess, but the logo was still not readable.

I then inserted the Blu-Ray and my jaw dropped. The logo was in sharp focus, reading “University of Oklahoma” with the logo in the center. In the words of Keanu Reeves, “Whoa!”

The disc still has the commentary from director Jan De Bont and visual effects supervisor Stefen Fangmeier; the music video from Van Halen, and the featurette “Anatomy of the Twister.” Added to the new version is a new 30-minute featurette: “Chasing the Storm: Twister Revisited,” the HBO First Look “The Making of Twister,” featurette, and the History Channel documentary “Nature Tech: Tornadoes.”

The reason that Blu-Ray is so much clearer is that it uses 1080 lines of resolution as opposed to conventional DVD’s 480 lines. The really technical details are all available on the Internet, if you want to know. I’d recommend Wikipedia’s article for a start.

There’s been some backlash against the HD formats from Hollywood actors and actresses, who are concerned that their blemishes will show up much more magnified in HD than conventional. My take on that is that the tabloid magazines will do much more to bring up blemishes than HD ever will.

The format war was effectively won when Warner Bros., which had been the only studio releasing titles in both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, announced in January that they would go exclusively Blu-Ray in 2008. Toshiba called it quits soon after.

This has left Paramount and Universal, the two studios that were exclusively HD-DVD, in something of a lurch. All of their content already out on HD-DVD started dropping in price, along with the players. Today, you can’t find an HD-DVD player in the stores, and most of the HD-DVD discs are clearance priced.

Blu-Ray titles are still not in great supply, though. There are probably about 600-700 titles available, with more being added weekly. However, the higher cost (about $10 more per disc at retail) means that consumers will be selective on what titles they want to see in HD.

As of today, Paramount has about 24 titles coming out on Blu-Ray, starting around May 20. Some of the highlights: “Cloverfield,” “Babel,” “Bee Movie,” “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” “There Will Be Blood,” and “World Trade Center.” Universal has not announced any Blu-Ray titles as of yet, but I imagine that will change in the weeks to come.

I took my copies of the “Spider-Man” trilogy and the “Die Hard” films to CD Exchange and traded them (with some extra cash thrown in for good measure) for their Blu-Ray sets. I was rather disappointed to find that the extras for “Spider-Man” and “Spider-Man 2″ did not make it onto the Blu-Ray sets. They’re not on the individually sold discs either, although “Spider-Man 2” does have the “2.1” enhanced version. And it does have “Spider-Man 3’s” extras on a separate disc. I might never have watched the extras for the first two films ever again, but that didn’t mean I wanted to give them up.

The Blu-Ray version of “Live Free or Die Hard” dropped the “Uncut” version, with all of the F-bombs restored. Personally, I liked the PG-13 version better, but that didn’t mean I wanted to lose the uncut version, either.

And now that the format war is officially over, I’d like to make some requests for Blu-Ray editions. Yes, I realize that they are all special-effects extravaganzas; those are the films best suited for the format. I don’t think that “Sleepless in Seattle” or similar films really need the Blu-Ray treatment, but that’s my opinion.

The “Indiana Jones” films: I expect these films to come out on Blu-Ray when “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” comes out on DVD.

The “Matrix” trilogy: Yes, the second and third films were disappointing compared to the first. But they were still visually incredible.

The “Lord of the Rings” trilogy: Probably don’t need ALL of the extras on the Special Edition discs, but the films themselves…

The “Star Trek” films: Not all of them are worth converting (“Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” comes to mind), but they would be worth it as a box set. And while we’re on the subject, I feel sorry for all of the folks who bought Season 1 of the updated “Original Series” HD-DVDs at $150 a copy. At least they’ll be able to flip them over and watch the conventional versions. Paramount is preparing to release Season 2 in August, but it doesn’t look like they’ll be adding HD-DVD to that set. No word on if they’ll re-do Season 1 in Blu-Ray, or offer customers with the HD-DVD set a refund, but I doubt it. One more thing: we don’t need TNG, DS9, Voyager, or Enterprise re-released in Blu-Ray. Please don’t try.

If you have any additions to the list, please feel free to write them in below.